Hunger in the news

Cindy McCain, the wife of the former Republican presidential candidate, resumed her international aid work this week with a stop in Dubai on her way to India and Cambodia to volunteer at maternity hospitals. [...] On Tuesday, she toured the World Food Program's warehouse in this Gulf city-state and on Wednesday she gave an interview to Al-Arabiya _ the pan-Arab satellite television network that Barack Obama gave his first formal TV interview to as president.

Japan has extended an 860 million-yen (9.6 million-dollar) grant to help feed tens of thousands of people displaced by a Muslim separatist conflict in the southern Philippines, a UN aid agency said Wednesday. The Japan International Cooperation Agency and the World Food Programme (WFP) signed the grant agreement at the UN agency's Rome headquarters on Friday, the programme's Philippine office said in a statement. [...] The WFP and other groups say at least 100,000 civilians had been unable to return to their homes and farms in Mindanao, the homeland of a large Islamic minority, and needed long-term food rations.

Regional States, countries patrolling the pirate-infested waters off Somalia, and United Nations agencies are set to adopt an agreement this week to reinforce the fight against a scourge that has seen dozens of ships held for ransom in recent years, including vessels carrying UN food aid for millions of hungry Somalis. [...] Transport ministers and ambassadors of regional countries, States that have sent naval forces to protect shipping, including China, France, Italy, Japan, Russia and United Kingdom, and officials of international organizations cooperating with IMO, including the UN World Food Programme (WFP) are attending the meeting.

A delegation from the UN's World Food Program visited a provincial capital in central Somalia for the first time Wednesday since Islamists returned to power, Radio Garowe reports. The four-member delegation was led by Ms. Denise Brown, the WFP deputy country director for Somalia. [...] Sources close to the discussions told Radio Garowe that the WFP officers expressed concern about targeted killings and the safety of aid workers, while noting that humanitarian efforts will continue in the region.

As Ethiopia struggled with high food prices and a lack of relief aid in 2008, the UN children's agency, UNICEF, initiated one of the biggest responses to fight severe malnutrition ever undertaken. [...] "The global demand for ready-to-use therapeutic food outstripped supply last year, which gives the sense of the scale of the need," explained Louis-Georges Arsenault, director of UNICEF's emergency programmes. The agency has had to intensify its nutritional interventions in 17 of the 27 countries identified as worst affected by the global food price crisis. This year UNICEF is asking for just over US$1 billion in its new global appeal, of which health and nutrition needs will take the biggest portion – 38 percent - to care for women and children in only 36 countries, "and UNICEF runs operations in 150 countries," Arsenault noted.

The UN and international aid agencies, that are rushing assistance to over 250,000 civilians trapped in war-ridden northern Sri Lanka, have asked all sides in the conflict to ensure that people are treated according to international humanitarian law. The recent surge in fighting between the government forces and the LTTE has prompted warnings from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other UN officials about the humanitarian impact of the conflict on the people of Sri Lanka. [...] Since early October, some 519 trucks have transported over 8,000 tons of food from the UN World Food Programme (WFP), as well as water and sanitation materials, school supplies, clothing and household goods supplied by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and UNHCR.

Thousands of Congolese civilians have fled across the border to South Sudan to escape rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday. About 2,000 left northeastern Congo for the Sudanese village of Lasu last week alone, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said. Thousands more Congolese are already living in South Sudan, having fled their villages for fear of attacks by the rebels Uganda-based rebel group, Ron Redmond told reporters in Geneva. The population in South Sudan is unable to support all the refugees, so the World Food Program plans to deliver emergency rations to the area, Redmond said.

Thousands of Gazans remain homeless and hospitals still have a large number of intensive care patients over a week after a ceasefire ended Israel's devastating three-week offensive, according to the latest United Nations update, which calls for immediate unhindered humanitarian access to the Strip's 1.5 million inhabitants. [...] All 10 UNRWA distribution centres are open, feeding 25,000 people per day, and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has distributed 95 tonnes of food aid to 993 families (nearly 6,000 people) in Gaza City and North Gaza.

Senior UN and international agency officials urged here on Monday actions against food crisis when almost one billion people in the world are going hungry. "With an expected increase of 40 million in 2008, the world today has reached 963 million people who are malnourished," said Jacques Diouf, Task Force vice-chairman and Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, at the opening of a Madrid meeting on Food Security for All. [...] "When the food crisis hit last year, the world came together in the largest emergency response to hunger and malnutrition in human history," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program (WFP). As the financial crisis hits the hungry even harder, she said, "we must sustain these unprecedented efforts to meet the urgent food and nutritional needs of the most vulnerable people, while promoting small-holder farmers and agriculture."

Countries struggling to secure credit have resorted to barter and secretive government-to-government deals to buy food, with some contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In a striking example of how the global financial crisis and high food prices have strained the finances of poor and middle-income nations, countries including Russia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Morocco say they have signed or are discussing inter-government and barter deals to import commodities from rice to vegetable oil. [...] Josette Sheeran, head of the UN's World Food Programme, said senior government officials, including heads of state, had told the WFP they were facing "difficulties" obtaining credit to purchase food. "This could be a big problem," she told the Financial Times.